Alcohol and Muscle Disease

Abstract

It is well established that alcohol consumption produces a wide spectrum of muscle damage whose clinical manifestations range from an acute rhabdomyolysis to an asymptomatic, sub-clinical form, detectable only by laboratory investigations. Recent experimental studies have shown that alcohol acts directly on the muscles producing ultrastructural and metabolic abnormalities within the muscle cells, similar to some of the features of human alcoholic myopathy. Alcohol also produces a generalized metabolic imbalance throughout the body which imposes and additional metabolic stress on the muscles. This paper examines the interaction between the direct and indirect effects of alcohol in the pathogenesis of muscle disease and concludes that there is a major metabolic component in the development of alcoholic myopathy.